2015/05/18 – Wingfield High School’s Principal Willie Killins’ words are heartbreaking. Describing the students whom he recruits into his in-school leadership program, Killin told The Clarion Ledger on May 7, “These aren’t bad kids. They’re usually adolescents facing adult problems — crushing poverty, domestic abuse, hopelessness and hunger — who don’t know how to handle it and take out their frustrations at school.”

Killins has brought new hope to Wingfield, a school that graduated less than half of its 12th-graders in 2014, with his the Phoenix School for Leadership and Careers. In addition to their regular classes, Phoenix students learn conflict resolution, how to set goals and make better choices and, in the process, do better in school and gain self-respect.

Wingfield serves a south Jackson neighborhood that was once solidly middle class with intact families and thriving businesses. As the area suffered economic decline and many families moved away, Wingfield’s student population changed as well — to families trying to deal with not enough money to meet basic family needs, including enough food to eat.

New research by Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren shows just how much children are affected by the neighborhoods where they grow up. In fact, some geographic locations are associated with a 35 percent cut in future income for boys who live there, compared to their peers.

It should be to no one’s surprise that Chetty and Hendren’s map of Mississippi has few neighborhoods that boost a child’s chances of success; way too much of the state leaves Mississippi children at risk for a lifetime of less opportunity, less upward mobility, poorer health and school failure.

Which brings us to the results of the third grade reading gate test. For the most part, schools in middle class areas did well while schools serving children in poverty did not.

The real question is what can we do with this information? At the very least, state legislators should follow their own mandate and appropriate the $8.7 million needed to pay for the 145 highly qualified literacy teachers/interventionists who are supposed to provide the daily intensive reading instruction to the approximately 5,800 students who need it.

And while we are on the subject of funding, the long-term underfunding of Mississippi schools really does matter. The Proposition 42 Facebook page shows what missing MAEP funding could have provided to school districts: more teachers, lower class size, more textbooks and library books, new computers.

If Mississippi schools cannot pay competitive salaries and offer good working conditions, they lose good teachers to other states and other professions. If districts cannot provide enough of what they know works with their at-risk students — whether that is technology or school supplies or trained literacy coaches and interventionists — many of those at-risk students are going to fail.

One very basic action most if not all Mississippi school districts could take with no additional state funding is to set up USDA subsidized summer feeding programs for their students, especially in high-poverty neighborhoods. Families who have trouble feeding their children during the school year are not magically going to find more food to put on the table when school is out.

And neighborhoods and the shape they are in does matter. Counties and cities can do a better job of making certain residential and commercial properties are not allowed to deteriorate. Deteriorating rental property and houses in arrears on taxes in other U.S. cities are given to nonprofits for renovation to provide low-income families a decent and affordable place to live. We could do more of that.

While it is true students must learn to read and understand in grades K-3 so they can read to learn from then on, the ingredients for school success are more complicated than that. Schools need more than good teachers and principals, involved parents and sufficient supplies. For students to thrive, school must also be a place where children are safe and valued, learn to treat each other with respect, have healthy food to eat, and where they can discover a life-long love of learning to fuel their future success.

Source: The Clarion-Ledger 

Lynn Evans